How can scalability help you develop your marketplace?
When developing a marketplace, it's important to think about scalability first and foremost. Indeed, your marketplace must meet a market need at a given moment, and having a solution that doesn't will probably be synonymous with difficulties or even failure. You need to imagine and choose a solution that can adapt quickly and efficiently to the constraints of your environment.
What do we mean by scalability?
Let's start with the definition of scalability. It refers to a product's ability to scale up, increasing its performance and functionality in line with market demands. In high-demand markets, it's not always easy to predict and anticipate, and it's essential to be able to rapidly adapt functionalities in line with demand. In this sense, the scalability of your project is essential.
In a marketplace, scalability is essential, because the market is growing fast, demands are constantly evolving and needs change almost from week to week. Even if anticipation must be a priority in your business, you need to be able to constantly adapt the tool you're going to use and therefore be scalable, almost ad infinitum. Don't forget that markets are constantly evolving, both structurally and legally!
Scalability on a marketplace comes into play on a number of levels. Firstly, in terms of structure and performance, the tool must be able to keep pace with your evolutions, i.e. :
- traffic,
- storage,
- security.
In terms of options and modules, scalability is also essential, as specific tools may need to be developed and implemented depending on constraints, tools that were not necessarily imagined from the outset. On the legal front, operators are subject to ever-increasing constraints, and the marketplace must be able to adapt to meet these standards.
3 tips to ensure the scalability of your marketplace
Understand market expectations
Creating a marketplace is a challenge, and the first instinct is to launch with a fully developed solution, incorporating dozens of functions, even before presenting the concept to the market. Many customers or prospects want to offer a complete solution, which is understandable.
However, you need to be careful, because your idea, however good it may be, may not be what your market expects. You need to test your platform in the field before you start developing functionalities. Of course, I'm not talking about essential functionalities, but those that can be deployed when growth thresholds are reached.
So there are two questions you need to ask yourself before taking the plunge:
- What is the primary need met by my idea?
- What functionalities should be considered, and in what timeframe?
Based on this premise, it's a good idea to set objectives and put in place all the tools and KPIs you need to understand your needs and translate them into action. You need to be in constant contact with your customers, facilitating all the processes involved in understanding, analyzing and enabling them to pass on information to you.
To understand market expectations, anticipate them and implement them, you need to gather requirements, imagine them, build them and then implement them.
Launch even an incomplete MVP
Once your primary needs have been clarified, it's easier to launch your MVP (Minimum Viable Product). With this first version, which could be called a beta version, you'll already have a feel for the sector's expectations, unidentified needs and the real constraints of all the players involved.
This MVP will enable you to fully exploit your idea, but above all to adapt it. By adopting this approach, you will position yourself as an essential player, who understands, analyzes and is able to put in place the necessary tools.
Rely on the agile method
Agility will be your strength. You'll be able to provide a strong response to a problem identified in your MVP. You may not have imagined it at the outset. Then you'll be able to create your functionality exactly as it should be, and not as you had in mind at the outset.
Another advantage of keeping to the Agile method is that you can set yourself development milestones and finance evolutions according to these. In my experience, between 10 and 30% of the project evolves directly at launch, despite prior anticipation and market research.
How can the scalability of your tools help you develop your marketplace?
The choice of your solution is absolutely essential. Generally speaking, there are two solutions to choose from:
- a proprietary solution or
- a SaaS solution.
A proprietary solution, like a SaaS solution, is not necessarily scalable. A fortiori, in SaaS mode, the solution's publisher may not be in a position to make the developments you might need. It's not easy to be scalable and modular in a common block, especially if the tool wasn't designed that way.
In proprietary mode, you also need to ensure that the very structure of your project is scalable. It's not uncommon to see projects stalled or having to be rebuilt, because the technology, infrastructure and code are unable to adapt.
It's not a question of the project adapting to the solution, but of the solution adapting to the project!
With this in mind, Medialeads has built a solution that clearly meets this need for scalability. The very heart of our tools is scalability. Whatever your project or idea, we work in the same way, imagining in advance all the tools needed for the MVP, and the likely evolutions. We then create a core that can evolve to meet your needs.
Today, Medialeads is able to create scalable proprietary solutions that are totally customized, with specific and unique methods. Our SaaS solution also meets this fundamental need, so that every project, even if contained within our solution, will be scalable and not limited by code.
In conclusion, whatever your strategic approach, you need to anticipate requirements in terms of solutions and information retrieval. Bear in mind that your platform will continue to evolve, so the choice of partner becomes a major issue, as does understanding how to guarantee efficient scalability.
Article translated from French